What I think about when I think about our products.
Team Letter | December 16, 2024
December 16, 2024
Happy Monday, Alpaca!
Last week a potential investor asked me a simple question: “how are you thinking about your product going forward?” How DO I think about our product going forward? We’ve spent this year creating and launching a really unique offering with Alpaca resources, packs, and pulse surveys. It’s incredibly exciting to see some early traction, and to start learning from our customers about where they’re seeing value.
But how do we know what to build next? How do we continue to add value, without bloating the product and sacrificing the simplicity? How do we make our product broadly appealing, without trying to be “all things to all people?”
I spent some time writing and thinking about this question, because I think it’s central to our discussions this week about Alpaca’s goals in 2025. Here’s what I know today.
Overall, my goal with our product is to strip away everything we know about "teacher retention" or "teacher recognition" and answer the question, "What would make teachers LOVE their jobs?” The problem we’re trying to solve is not how to increase substitute fill rates or get a few more teachers to not quit this year or to call in sick less often from work.
The real problem is that in our world today, teaching is a job that is both completely essential to the functioning of our communities, but often not valued as a vital, viable, exciting, fulfilling, professional career path. Yes, earning power has something to do with that perception. But it’s not just that. When I chose education as my major in college, I did it because I love learning new things, teaching new things, and understanding the world around me in big ways. But I certainly had family members and friends say “You’re going to pay all that money to get a four year education and then make $40K a year as a TEACHER?” (I showed them — I went into nonprofit management instead and made even less. ;))
We hear this challenge all the time when we ask educators about their role and they say “I’m just a para.” or “I’m just a math teacher.” That word — “just” — gets me every time. And yet, educators have the same level of formal education (and sometimes more!) as the accountants, project managers, marketing directors, and business owners in their circles. So how do you change the perception? How does teaching become a sought after, highly held profession?
It’s a tall order. And I think it’s what we’re here for.
So how do we start solving it? What actually drives teachers to not just stay in their jobs, but show up for their jobs each day, feel engaged and enthusiastic and rewarded by their jobs, and become advocates again for the career of education. What would THAT take?
I think it's about five things. I think it’s about teachers finding autonomy, purpose, mobility, connection, and voice at work. In my brain, these five things operate kind of as the outcomes of leaning in to our five drivers. So, in other words, when a school community has supportive leadership, a high trust team, connected communities, a healthy workplace, and opportunities for growth, our teachers find autonomy, purpose, mobility, connection, and voice.
I’ll explain a bit about each:
Autonomy: Like all professionals, educators need to feel like they have the freedom to choose the best ways to do their job and know that they’re trusted by their leaders to do their best work.
Purpose: When you spend more than 2,000 hours per year doing anything, it should feel like it’s worth it, and like it has an effect on the world. Building a sense of purpose in our jobs every day helps us stay on track even when the work is really tough.
Mobility: No professional likes the feeling of being stagnant or “stuck” — we all want to continue to grow and progress in our careers, and educators are no different.
Connection: Do you enjoy coming to work and seeing your coworkers who you’ve created connections with? Of course! We all do. Having connection to students, families, and fellow educators is essential.
Voice: When you’re a trained professional doing a hard job, you want to have a voice in the workplace — and you should! More voices create better organizations.
Fortifying these five things is work that happens at the leadership level. It requires empowering school leaders with tools to become great people managers and to see themselves as great people managers — and that idea is new in a lot of education settings, I’ve learned.
That last one — voice — is I think the most overlooked aspects of the career of education right now. At Alpaca in the short term, we're focusing on "voice" -- our pulse surveys are giving teachers a voice in a way they haven't had before, and providing real, recognized value back to principals and to district HR teams.
As an added bonus, they're also doubling as product research for us, delivering back thousands of insights from teachers around the country every month about how they're actually doing and what they perceive that they need. That product is nascent but it's working, and we're going continue to strengthen it in the year ahead.
Long term, each of those five things (autonomy, purpose, mobility, connection, and voice) will hold its own roadmap. When we’re launching work that accomplishes all five of those things, then we’re building the employee engagement and culture platform for K-12 education. No system-of-record software for this purpose exists today -- district HR has long been focused on compliance, payroll, and substitutes, and never on attracting, engaging, and retaining talent. So we'll take a page from the private sector and build something like Culture Amp or Fifteen Five for K-12, with a clear emphasis on culture and engagement for education.
So what do WE do with this information right now? Let’s test it. Let’s see what might be missing from this list. Let’s ask ourselves about a product feature or about a resource — does it improve or increase one of those five things? Let’s hold it as an experiment in the months ahead, and see what we can learn from it.
I’m super interested in your feedback here, and in discussing this with you as we work to set goals this week. Let’s find that discussion together!
Onward, Alpaca!
KB